Indeed. The only quotes I ever had in a CS publication were some non-CS quotes at the start of chapters of my PhD thesis.

No. They have to win for each target individually. And they may have to do so repeatedly. That is a completely different situation.

I was just pointing out that nobody is going to attack normal keyboards successfully, because there is nothing in there that can be attacked.

Oh? And which language implementations do you know that actually have such a proof? For real world languages and implementation, the number is likely "zero" as most languages do not have a formal specification that could be used as starting point in the first place.

And here is one more hint from the real world: Nobody proves compiler correctness using formal methods for real languages, because nobody can pay the huge amount of money that would cost or wait the few decades it would take. Instead there is this thing called "testing".

BS. A formal specification is needed if you want to use automated theorem proving to prove properties of the language or if you want to generate compilers automatically. For specifying how an implementation works, you need an exact specification, but that can well be (and usually is) an informal one.

Come on people, does nobody know basic CS terms anymore?

That is BS. In order to create a second implementation, you need an _exact_ specification. It being a formal specification is completely optional.

That is not possible. The English language is not a formal specification language and hence does not allow the creation of formal specifications using it. ANSI C does not have a formal specification.

A formal specification is a specification done in a formal specification language. There is no other meaning of that term. The people claiming they are doing a "formal" specification likely confused this with "exact". These two concepts are orthogonal. A formal specification can be inexact (or even unsound), while an informal specification can be exact (and sound).

A "formal standard" is something else, it usually refers to a more-or-less exact and complete _informal_ specification that is uniquely identified by its designation. The main difference is that in theory, you could check a formal specification for soundness using an automated theorem prover. Or you could automatically generate a compiler from it. An informal (but possibly exact) specification does not allow that, as it needs a human in the loop.

You cannot do formal specifications that way. A formal specification must always be done in a formal specification language, or it is not a formal specification. As I have pointed out, you can do exact non-formal specifications and that is what C and C++ have.

The price of the hardcover is higher because it comes out first, and so it gets more money from people who are willing to spend it. The trick is that, if you sell something for $15, wait a year, and drop the price to $8 and keep selling it (so it's obviously not just on clearance), you're going to tick off the people who spent $15. If you give them a slightly nicer physical package, so you're not selling the exact same thing for $8, you get an extra $7 from the people who really want it without making them resent you. The problem with just dropping the price of the eBook is that it does cause that resentment.

You also seem to be imagining books being sold on a cost plus profit basis, so a book that's cheaper to produce should be correspondingly lower priced. In fact, like everything else, books are priced to maximize profit. It turns out that book demand is pretty inelastic, so that a book priced at $4 won't sell anywhere near twice as many copies as if it were priced at $8. There's limits to how many books I'm going to buy regardless of cost, and books are pretty cheap entertainment (even at my reading speed). (There's also the fact that the difference in cost between a physical book and an eBook isn't all that great. If it were possible to sell hundreds of thousands of $1 books, the price difference would be very significant, but it usually isn't.)

What Amazon and Scalzi are arguing about is primarily who benefits from what (and secondarily about demand curves). Amazon and Scalzi both benefit from every copy of "Redshirts" Amazon sells, but Scalzi benefits from copies sold through other venues and Amazon doesn't. To make up numbers, suppose an $18 hardcover. If the eBook is $15, Scalzi will presumably sell more physical hardcovers, and the 74% increase in sales for a $10 eBook might come at the expense of the hardcover, so Scalzi makes more money on the eBooks, less on the paper editions, and loses overall. (Disclaimer: I bought the Nook version of the book.) Moreover, Scalzi is interested in having some sort of competition in the bookselling business, so he's not completely at Amazon's mercy in a dispute between Amazon and his publisher, while Amazon would like a monopoly in the bookselling business.

Cool. I hadn't noticed that feature.

So there really is no advantage to browsing in physical stores.

It's pretty clear that Slashdot summaries are only tested on the incompetents and mentally ill. (Alternately, those are the people writing them.)

The one time I wanted to rate an app, it told me to make an app-rating account with a distinct name. That's when I stopped.

Wasn't there a Slashdot article about some developers who had their app selected for free app of the day, and wound up with support costs considerably greater than what they actually made?

What do you mean by "what's ACTUALLY happening"? We've got darn few ways to observe things that happen on this scale, and elementary particles and their combinations behave considerably differently from the scale of the universe we're most familiar with. Electrons behave very differently from charged baseballs, and trying to explain electrons in terminology suitable for baseballs is not productive.

In the meantime, there's quantum phenomena that we inherently can't observe directly. We can measure the spin state of an electron once, getting a binary answer, and then we can't get any more information about what the spin was. We can't simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle beyond a certain precision. In the two-slit experiment, we can't know which slit an electron goes through without changing the results drastically. (We can figure out some of this statistically. Given a stream of electrons that are similar in some way, we can measure the spins on the electrons in quantity and get useful results beyond up-down.)

So, could you pick a quantum phenomenon and give us a possible explanation in terms you'd accept as describing what's actually happening?